"The MMO market is now very competitive. Getting anyone to pay attention to your game is now considerably more difficult. Even the Mac has WoW and EVE, but the PC (the trailer not being platform-specific) is far more densely packed, with new products coming out every few weeks."
- incarnate source: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/22149#274445

So...you could advertise VO a little bit in the linux sector. We don't have so much MMOs and at the moment (as far as I know) there is absolutely no space based MMO, aside from Freelancer (which doesn't have newton physics and I'm not 100% sure if it is running natively under linux). Eve had once linux support, but they dropped it.

So...your the only one in this section for us linuxgamers.

The problem is: Many ppl just don't know that VO exists, some have heared of it but didn't knew it is available for linux, too.

From time to time (on bigger events) someone (maybe you?) is posting it on linuxgamers.com (which is where I "found" this game).

One thing could be holarse-linuxgaming.de, it's a german website but they speak english, too ;) so you can contact them. They've a project running where the game publisher/programer can give one or two keys away for testing (maybe even the 8hour testing phase is enough, I guess you've to ask the admins from holarse about that) (the testers are users from the holars-linuxgaming.de community).

You'll get a newspost on the webpage (maybe bundled with some other games) when the game is entered into the "to test" table and a newspost when the test is completed.

just my 2 cents.
detru

I push about every other release to HappyPenguin, and every single release to FreshMeat. Major updates are pushed to LinuxGames, Linux-gamers and Slashdot. So, we do try to bring in some attention in that space. We've also had print writeups in at least one UK-based Linux magazine. However, a lot of Linux gaming-specific sites are pretty.. ephemeral, they don't last long. So it makes it tough to get the word out in any centralized location. Plus, I don't think the density of gamers is quite as high. They're definitely out there (we have plenty of them playing), and we try to reach them, but it can be a more problematic market to find than Mac or Windows.

ah, okay.

didn't knew about FreshMeat and LinuxGames, tnx ;).

and yeh, there are not so many ppl which are using linux and gaming...part of the problem is that they are not enough games or not the correct games ;).

sorry that I've underestimated your efforts to get players under linux :/

There is also the blurb at the end of the distrowatch.com site. Just in case nobody pays attention. ;)

hmm, I've adblockplus activated so...no banners and such things ;)

Eve had once linux support, but they dropped it.

Just for the record, EVE runs faster in Wine than it does on Windows. I've heard this is also the case for WoW, but I've never tried it personally.

@ladron yeh, for some games that's true, because wine is not a 1:1 copy of a windows kernel. The functionnames are the same, even what they do is the same (in case of the result), but the difference is HOW they are doing it...and sometimes the wine devs are having the better/faster way to do something and sometimes the microsoft guys are having the better/faster way to do it.

Incarnate you probably have over half the linux gamers here already... :P

An ad on slashdot might be a good way to reach the linux/techie crowd....

Once VO 2.0 comes out Guild would do well to pay for some space on the major search engines....

We already pay for Google ads. We just can't pay for very many of them.

"Once VO 2.0 comes out ..."

PaKettle you know something I don't know? Or is that just something like "after 1.0 there should be 2.0 ..."

@incarnate...phew, I really miss things by having adblock plus activated... ;)

2.0 is a planned major update that's coming Soon(tm).

@lecter uhm...tnx for the info...

-> http://my.mmosite.com/blog/c38932b984cf4a8103bc41d64a1f9b59/blog/item/be87eb096d2d850ce4becf1207c2e7f5.html

so it's just a version number not a "hey, we bumped a whole set of changes, plus new content, plus improvements to the graphic out and we are now at version 2.0"

No, it's a specific set of goals that coincide with a given version milestone. This is why we're still on 1.8.x, instead of 1.9. The updates within x.x version may be mostly whatever changes transpire therein, but significant version updates are based on meeting intended goals.

1.9 happens when the Trident becomes available for player use.
And/or some other major change.

There should be a mmorpg.com article popping up soon ;). If you could post on it, it definitely would help the game. Also, if you want more people to come to the game start uploading pictures onto the mmorpg.com website because it generates a lot of voting.

I've seen a bunch of people come over from that alone.

Thanks!

@Destructor lol I never thought anyone would ever see that one for some reason.

Possibly, you could build debian installers, and get them into the Ubuntu repos?

I've talked to some Ubuntu people, they basically implied we had no hope of getting into any official repository (even like super-expanded-universe or whatever), and we were best off making our own repository.

We've had plans to roll a Debian/Ubuntu package for awhile, just haven't gotten around to it, but we'll most likely have to host our own repository. As far as I can tell, anyway.

Really? Have you asked the open suse people if you could add an rpm to thier official repository?

I believe this is the one you want it in....

http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/non-oss/

No, I haven't talked to them. Maintaining a new installer is time consuming. We have to continually re-roll and push out new versions to reduce pressure on the patch server, any time there's a larger patch. Maintaining direct downloads and torrents across our "usual" Windows/Mac/Linux32/Linux64 is troublesome enough. I will probably roll an Ubuntu package at some point, but going after every other linux distro starts to hit a diminishing return on time-investment pretty quickly.

Hm? It seems like you just write a spec file and some dh_make rules and then add .rpm and .deb building to your deploy process. I can't remember the last time any file locations for Vendetta changed...